Silvia Siller (Mexico)
Poet, she teaches Spanish and has taught Latin-American poetry at the New York Public University. She studied a Master’s in International Relations at Columbia University, has a Master’s in French and has completed several Diplomas in Contemporary Literature. Finalist of the Entreversos contest (2017) of the Mar Azul Foundation in Venezuela, poems that have been published by New York Poetry Press Danza de cuatro brazos (Dance of four arms). Her collections of poems have been recognized in the International Latino Book Award 2015 and 2016. She received the G. Mistral, J. Burgos and F. Kahlo award from the Galo Plaza group in New York for her contribution to Latin American culture (2015). She has multiple collections of poems, two unpublished, and she has been published in various anthologies and, digital and literary magazines. She directs a cultural radio program –Cultural Dialogues with Silvia Siller on CalleVieja Radio. She has also danced flamenco and has written flamenco theater plays with poetry. She accompanied the exhibition Man(o)rar by Luciana Corres at the Franz Mayer Museum (2018) and at the Oaxaca Textile Museum (2017). Participant in multiple international festivals: Nicaragua, FIL of Guadalajara, Colombia, Chile, New York, Spain, El Salvador and Costa Rica.
DIEHARD ROMANTIC
I’m a diehard romantic who favors delirium.
Night spies on my balcony as I pick up the fallen pieces of my day. The night knows of this famine, after leaving all my roles scattered in the city of hiding fangs under each and every salt exchange. We all need the night, or at least the silence, to draw inward before disguising our smile again with that viscous spirit, face to face with another morning that will arrive in its city way. Still, the night, when it’s long, when it conquers us –prisoners of silence — when it molds the lyrical space for metal-tempering, drops it all in the forge. It is a drug, the mercurial night that sweeps us up and away on stormy waves…to shipwreck? The words drown like fallen rowboat oars; there they go adrift, yet more than ever before, liberty.
RAG DOLL
And everything quivered inside me; skin,
a light caress,
your embrace seeking that desperate intensity…
between dreams you appear dressed in cold
smelling like a midnight flight
your kisses forcing my eyes open
the rag doll resists
my temperature’s enough
the journey ends
you made it home
CONVERGENCES
A maze converges with a forest at night
a slow motion and a sunset,
the pearls that hide in their oyster shells converge
and when the sky cracks there,
on the side of a peeking storm,
the ocean converges when it insists to the sands
that monotony is a blue clock
and like bored keening waves,
they unwittingly erode the future
But the same kiss and your waning smile,
that same diagonal look in your eyes
your silvery brushing beard,
your mischievous hands
despite it all, converge on me
still
AT TIMES I AM A RIVER
I cry to no end,
I run through the forest;
forgiven of absolved sins
I bless my solitude
and the leisure unleashed at sunset
sad, dense, I don’t know
another winter, another year born,
another death to rebirth
in the parenthesis of silence
the fountain bursts
without my knowing
I give birth as I go
and letters pour out,
well-nourished words
announcing something about to break
then, the poem-river
roars and howls
like an ocean.
*Bilingual Collection: Early Morning No. 5 (2015)
Translated by Walter Krochmal
Mil felicidades a Silvia Siller. Una gran poeta. Disfruto la sencillez de sus temas y lo ligero de su propopuesta poética. Gracias por compartir
Alberto Pastor